A lot as been said about the benefits of releasing your product as early as possible – you get feedback earlier, if the product is doomed you find out earlier and you get some cash-flow earlier.

But there is one even grater advantage, especially for tiny companies – it gets the product released.

Back before I released yaTimer I had 4 mostly finished product I was going to sell, I wrote a web page for yaTimer with a form that let people request access to the beta, put it on-line and ran a small AdWords campaign.

Before I had the web pages for the other 3 products ready I started getting beta requests – so I had no choice but to finish yaTimer and start selling it.

By the way, as far as I know, non of those who requested beta access even downloaded the software and I suspect that those requests were mostly click fraud (when a site owner clicks – or hire others to click – on ads on his/hers own site just to get money out of the advertiser).

And it’s the same with Squirrel Clock, the beta is up (you can create your beta account on this page), I have some boring and tedious reporting code I have to write – but I have no choice, the program is already out there and I have to complete the reports feature, I can’t work on some other almost complete product.

Releasing a product in an early incomplete stage will force you to complete the product – if you wait until the product is truly ready there’s a good chance you will never ship it.